AtD and the Wild West

[Paul Nightingale]

Richard Slotkin (1993) Buffalo Bill's "Wild West" and the Mythologization of
the American Empire in Amy Kaplan & Donald E. Pease eds, Cultures of United
States Imperialism, Duke UP.

Some of this will be familiar to those who have seen Robert Altman's film
Buffalo Bill and the Indians (1976), based on Arthur Kopit's play Indians.
(I think I remember the film being described as Altman's gift to the
bicentennial celebrations.)

The opening of Slotkin's essay:

"'Buffalo Bill's Wild West' was for more than thirty years (1883-1916) one
of the largest, most popular, and successful businesses in the field of
commercial entertainment. The Wild West was not only a major influence on
American ideas about the frontier past at the turn of the century, it was a
highly influential overseas advertisement for the United States during the
period of massive European emigration. It toured all of North America and
Europe, and its creator William F. Cody became an international celebrity,
on terms of friendship with European royalty and heads of state, as well as
with the leadership of the American military establishment. With its
hundreds of animals, human performers, musicians, and workmen, its boxcars
filled with equipment and supplies, it was nearly as large and difficult to
deploy as a brigade of cavalry; and since it went everywhere by railroad (or
steamship) it was far more mobile. The staff of the Imperial German army was
said to have studied Buffalo Bill's methods for loading and unloading trains
in planning their own railroad operations." (164)

[...]

"From its inception in 1882 it was called 'The Wild West,' (or 'Buffalo
Bill's Wild West') a name which identified it as a "place" rather than a
mere display or entertainment." (165)

Cf P's blurb: "... one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at
all."

Slotkin goes on to point out the role played by BBWW in mythologizing the
West. As in Wister's The Virginian (1902) 'the Wild West' is constructed as
a past age, one to be viewed with nostalgia.

Cody was, it seems, quite gloriously cynical in his self-mythologising: his
"continuing engagement with the Plains wars strengthened his claims of
authenticity"(167).

In the aftermath of Little Big Horn, in 1876: "Cody singled out and killed a
young warrior named Yellow Hand; then, as the troopers swept toward him,
walked to the corpse, scalped it, and waved his trophy in the air.  

"This scene became the core of the Buffalo Bill legend and the basis of his
national celebrity. Before the year was over he would be hailed in the
national press as the man who took 'The First Scalp for Custer.' But the
chief mythologizer of the event was Cody himself. That winter he would star
in The Red Right Hand; or, The First Scalp for Custer, a melodrama in which
the "duel" with Yellow Hand becomes the climax of a captivity rescue
scenario." (168)

History as performance, which might be said to add a dollop of irony to
"[n]o reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred".